TROUBLED Queensland children removed from their families will be locked up in a radical departure from a failing residential care system.

And government officials and police will be told to raise the threshold for removal of at-risk children from troubled homes in an attempt to stop splitting Queensland families apart.

Police, required to report potential child abuse with almost every domestic violence call-out, will be allowed to some discretion to stop the over-reporting of child abuse.

The proposals, understood to be contained in the Carmody Report into Child Protection, are key planks in a document providing the blueprint for an overhaul of the state's child safety system.

The $9 million year-long inquiry, which has heard nearly 400 hours of evidence from Brisbane to the far northern community of Aurukun, has spotlighted a developing crisis as the 8000-plus children in state care eclipses our prison population.

Commissioner Tim Carmody, who will hand his findings to Premier Campbell Newman at the end of the week, is believed to have made some tough recommendations, expected to spark resistance from some quarters of the child protection sector, which cost taxpayers more than $730 million a year.

The most confronting is the recommendation to return to some form of secure care children removed from biological parents, a move welcomed by others in the sector as the only way to short-circuit their descent into adult prison.

A small group of such children, numbering only in the hundreds, are so damaged they cannot operate in normal society, the inquiry has heard.

Many are at risk of self-harm and some are literally born drug addicts, developing addictions in the womb.

Unable to fit into the foster care system because of antisocial behaviour, many are housed in suburban houses run by private companies.

The rise of the unsecured, residential homes was a direct response to the abuse scandals surrounding institutionalised care in the '80s and early '90s.

But the Carmody report will recommend a return to some form of secure care already operating in England, Canada and NSW.

The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists has backed the proposal, recommending ``the introduction of a secure children's home model''.

"Children can receive the help they need before they are on a trajectory towards long-term incarceration in the adult prison.''

Care provider Mercy Family Services supports it but social services umbrella group PeakCare says the state must be careful before locking up children.

"Legislated provisions would need to be proclaimed, stipulating the circumstances under which they may be detained separate to those that allow for their detention in a youth detention centre or mental health facility,'' PeakCare says.

Mr Carmody is also believed to be looking at ensuring that child safety officials work harder at keeping families together rather than taking children into state care.

At present children can technically be removed from home where there is merely expressions of intent of violence.

Police are also forced to fill out up to 40,000 reports a year to comply with laws that force them to report potential child abuse when called out to domestic violence disputes, even if the children are not present at the time of the dispute.

It is believed the Carmody report will give more discretion to police to decide whether children are at risk, while more resources are poured into prevention of child abuse to keep families intact.

Among the shocking details revealed at the inquiry are that between 5 and 10 per cent of the state's nearly 1.1 million children will suffer some form of abuse and that more than 7600 were in state care in 2011, compared to 5527 adult prisoners.

The inquiry heard examples of children in care including the nine-year-old girl who went on a $15,000 rampage and destroyed a home.

The child in the care of the state took two days to destroy the house and managed rest breaks before resuming her work.

The inquiry was told youth workers had difficulty restraining her because it's unlawful for staff to touch children in their care.

Police also told of being used as a ``blue light taxi'' to ferry runaways back to residential facilities in the Logan area, including one who had been reported missing 34 times, and that one group of troubled teens living in state-funded houses can cost $1 million a year and monopolise police resources.

The Carmody inquiry is the latest to try to help Queensland's troubled children, following on from the Forde Inquiry, which was established in 1998 and the 2003 inquiry conducted by the then Crime and Misconduct Commission.